I flew counter narcotics missions on the boarder and discovered the Salton Sea. I took my wife there when we were visiting Palm Springs. Little did I know of what a disaster it had become. The first time we were there we had only been there about 30 minutes when she said, "Get me out here, this is where zombies live. Cal Parks and Recreation has a somewhat different view of how the Salton Sea came to be but it tracks back to 1900 when the brought canals from the Colorado to irrigate the Imperial Valley farms. In 1906 the canals silted up and the dykes leaked and it flooded. That really put the Salton Sea on the map so to speak. By the fifties is had been developed, a marina built and it was billed as the Riviera of the US. All the big stars went there, Sonny and Cher, Old Blues Eyes, The Beach Boys. The land was partitioned off and sold by developers. There was great fishing as they planted fish and they were huge. Boating was big and they had a marina, hotels, bars, stores. Life was wonderful until 1976 when a freak storm hit and flooded the place as well and blue and tore down the marina. A year or 2 later it happened again and it was over. The sea began to dry up and get more salty, too salty for the fish and they die. About every three years they have a huge fish die off that smells. The fish have botulism and it kills the birds if they are not rescued. Sonny wrote some legislation to help them. The cost is astronomical. One woman said, "We needed help and along came Sonny Bono and then he went skiing.